Annette Messager & the Neolithic Childhood: Radical imaginings of prehistory in the 20th century.
During the interwar period, the French avant-garde elite created a melange of art, politics, anthropology, and archaeology, in an effort to contrive a potent theoretic toolkit against the advent of fascism. One such project was the appropriation of an imagined prehistory as a means to battle bourgeois individualism. Notions associated with the prehistoric man, such as animism, totemism and collective hallucination, provided an arsenal of subversive practices which could be mobilised to counter the ideologies of dominant systems. Some of the most interesting texts which put archaeology to mutinous use are by Carl Einstein, Roger Caillois, and Georges Bataille. More than creating archaeological metaphors, these thinkers propose that a resurgence of the aforementioned social forms can guide an extensive ontological project. Through these archaic practices they seek destabilise the dichotomising boundaries between animate-inanimate, subjective-objective, and real-imaginary. They propose that by subverting subject-object hierarchies (indicated as ‘S/O’ by Einstein) and dismantling semiotic codes, these social practices can inspire a total revolution beyond the paradigms of existent political systems. By evoking the prehistoric man, theorists enter a communion through time which defies linear conceptions of history. Their ‘regressive’ propositions incite an ontological revolution which even dares to reimagine the temporal axis. In this essay I shall take advantage of this transhistorical apparatus to discuss the works of an artist from the latter half of the century, namely Annette Messager, in relation to the revolutionary theoretic toolkit devised in the 1930s. Messager’s practice conjures a sacred realm through techniques akin to sacrifice and mimicry. She mixes naiveté and violence, playfulness and seriousness, high and low culture, to produce heterogeneous identifications and jams ontological border matrices. In this essay I wish to discuss how assumptions on prehistoric social practices have been used to reconfigure 20th century ontological systems, and suggest how these tendencies can be read in Messager’s work.
In Messager’s 1993 work Sans titre (Untitled) a pitched mosquito net sprawls out onto the gallery floor like dense mist. Under its canopy, draped by the skirts, are creatures in a circular formation. The members of this in-group are all animals: a taxidermied falcon and duck; a plush toy bunny and squirrel; and some Frankenstenian amalgamations, such a toy cat’s head stitched onto the preserved body of a real one. Some are natural enemies but are in a ceasefire during this communitas. The creaturely congregation is turned inwards and we, the onlookers, are excluded from their liminal space. Could this bestial ritual be a circle of solidarity in the wake of a traumatic event? Messager presents an ode to collectivity, which the avant-garde theorists also beckoned. Einstein’s text ‘André Masson: An Ethnological Study’ laments the bourgeois individualism which cripples any potential for collective activity. Though fascism presents an appearance of creating a cultic unity, the tyrannical figure overrides the reciprocal capacities of a true collective imagination. The collective hallucination Einstein envisions is not dictated by a master-slave dialectic. This rejection of S/O relationships is especially apparent in Messager’s grouping. By renouncing humans from their circle, the animals seem to excommunicate the domineering human who has for too long subordinated nature. The S/O division so integral to our perceptions has pit culture against nature and has finally lead to ecological demise. Now humanity risks its own extinction too. As Bataille would have it, the sovereign is in just as much of a bind as the servile and no constituent in the S/O relationship is free. Furthermore, Bataille posits that the modern man shares this trauma with his prehistorical ancestors: in Lascaux, or the Birth of Art he argues that the introduction of the tool, c. 500,000 years ago, was a traumatic event for humanity. When cavemen became homo faber, this propelled their separation from animals. Humanity found itself increasingly constrained by its own systems of values and meanings, including prohibitions, strict value systems, and conceptions of the sacred. According to Bataille, this trauma had been reignited in modernity when humanity found itself cornered in a dead-end of meanings and political directions. Messager’s tent shelters those rendered most vulnerable during this crisis, leaving the ‘false present’ out and imagining a world where our hierarchical categories no longer hold any currency.
The heterogeneous forms of the animals, with mixed-and-matched body parts, deny semiotic closures. Einstein opines that an essential function of artistic images is to liberate us from bodily norms and fixities— Messager chimeric figures are in a fluid, metamorphic bodily state. Such instability of the condition of matter places them in what Anselm Franke calls a ‘mimetic continuum’. Messager’s charcoal drawing Trophée; petites fesses (part of a series produced 1986 and 1988) is an image that stands unstable on this continuum. Amidst shadows, a round figure is illuminated. With a trick of the eye, or rather of the imagination, it equally appears to be the backside of a nude woman and the face of an animal. The hip-dips correspond with the bear’s eyes, the intergluteal cleft with the snout and medial cleft, and the two glutes with the two feline orbs of the bear’s upper lip. The concave eyes and snout —of what appears to be a teddy-bear— emanate a morbid appearance, skullish like a memento mori. Furthermore, despite being a charcoal drawing, the image uses a photographic register. The fragment of the body, dramatically lit and emerging out of depths, calls to mind Surrealist photography. It is evocative of Man Ray’s Minotaur (1933) , in content as well as stylistically. Both fuse the female body with the animal. Trophée thus plays on our senses not just in its imagery, but also in its medium. The 1930s avant-garde imaginary would have detected radical potentialities in this ‘formless’ image where ‘[t]he human form is shattered into the animal’. The muddling of taxonomic boundaries between human and animal incites an antihumanist sentiment. Through totemic identification, the seal of the human ego is broken and opened onto the heterogeneous world. ‘Man no longer observes,’ writes Einstein ‘[h]e lives in the orbit of objects that have become psychological functions’. Similarly, in writing on animal mimicry, Caillois discusses the tendency for organisms to become ‘no longer the origin of the coordinates, but one point among others’. This state of subject relativity upsets any attempt to establish a S/O dichotomy between what was previously imagined as having been two stable particulars. In his study on the sociology of games and play, Caillois argues that mimicry is a form of game in which the player ‘forgets, disguises, or temporarily sheds his personality in order to feign another’. Caillois relates this ‘pursuit of disorderly uncertainty’ to Sigmund Freud’s notion of the death drive. Messager too seems to hint at a desire for entropy and a rejection of objectalisation by inserting a trace of death to her drawing. Abandoning the ego and surrendering it into the environment runs its risks too, like becoming subsumed by the dominant regime. However, Caillois presents mimicry as a political weapon for guerrilla warfare against the witless variant of mimesis cultivated totalitarian regimes. He proposes ‘a strategic depersonalisation’, reminiscent of Einstein’s call for a ‘controlled chaotisation’. Caillois, Einstein and Bataille saw chaos as a function of the universe which should not be overcome and should be worked with. Their denial of any fixed ontology is modelled on the unstable and discontinuous nature of chaos. Evidently, using tactics like mimicry, art plays a great role in channelling such strategic disorder.
It is this pursuit of effacing the borders of the ego which shapes Bataille’s sacrificial philosophy. In her 1996 and 1997 works Dissection and Les Dépouilles (Skins) , Messager opens up, carves into, and lays bare the innards of plush toys and children's clothes like sacrificial victims. The inner linings of the clothes are pulled apart and pegged onto a wall, rendering the garbs unrecognisable. The small plushies are also pinned, but in a vertical row which resembles a totem pole. They open up symmetrically— evocative of Rorschach tests and monstrous orchids. The French word dépouille refers to animal hides. In titling children’s clothes ‘hides’, Messager suggests a direct link between little children and animals. Violence, and more specifically sacrifice, is the means by which the profane is converted into the sacred. Through violent means, Messager has imbued these profane objects —a little girl’s pink coat, a toddler’s blue bear— with a sacred aura. Her operations are not much different from what children are often capable of. The sinister installations remind us of our own infantile perversions and discredits the suggestion that childhood is an innocent and risk-free period. In ‘Neolithic Childhood’ Einstein writes, ‘[t]hrough decapitation and dismemberment, the decisive element is isolated: concentrated possession and sadism. In this way, children also destroy their dolls […] they exorcise and conjure by night’. Einstein draws on Sigmund Freud’s theory that childhood is an animist stage. Children, says Freud, are similar to the prehistoric man, i.e ‘the childhood of humanity’, in that they do not have calcified borders between the imaginary and the real. Thus despite children’s play seeming trivial to adult eyes, the stakes for those experiencing it are akin to the stakes of adult religious rituals. This state of psychic openness, what Einstein calls a ‘mental pluralism’, can imbue the profane, such as the toy, with sacred meaning. The totemised figures thus transcend their designated positions, defying the rules of unimaginative adult conventions. In their state of play, they propel serious, sacred operations. Einstein calls this a ‘psychic archaism’ and ‘hallucinatory coherence’. He suggests that such transference of meaning can produce new semiotic carriers which defy the false closures that serve the dominant system. From children’s games, as well as from the infancy of humanity, one may glimpse an opening for the possibility to do away with object hierarchies. Caillois is intrigued by the sacred as it is a domain comprised of an ambiguous set of practices regarding objects relations and produces unstable semiotic meanings. The sacred is both revered and disdained, a cause of allure and revulsion. Moreover there is often a very thin line between what is considered sacred as opposed to profane, or pure rather than impure. Through the sacred, the familiar can turn strange. While the matter of the object may stay stable, it is the ontological dimension that is transposed. In Totem and Taboo, Freud relates the initial totem of mankind to an oedipal fable, in which brothers band against their father to kill and devour him and his power. Through this sacrifice, the figure of the father becomes a totemic figure: a source which consolidates the social bond. Nonetheless, as Julia Kristeva reminds us, the initial sacrifice was premised on an act of revolt against the paternal figure. Future iterations of ritual sacrifice may reinstantiate rebellious urges, providing the means to confront and sublimate authoritative structures bearing upon its participants. ‘Revolt,’ writes Bataille in his essay titled ‘Sacrifice’, ‘tears from God his naive mask, and thus oppression collapses in the crash of time […] that for which lacerated existence goes into a trance—it is the Revolution—it is time released from all bonds; it is pure change’. Sacrifice frees from sovereignty, whether that be the tight grip of the ego or logics that take political oppression possible. Messager’s childish sacrifices remind us that this state of defiance starts almost at infancy— an important impulse we must not allow the adult world to domesticate.
Kristeva conjures revolt’s etymological roots, understanding it ‘as return, displacement, plasticity of the proper, movement toward the infinite and the indefinite’. In their returning to an imagined prehistory and childhood, thinkers of the 1930s were seeking to find ontological directions for the future of their struggle against authoritative and totalitarian regimes. While their project was directed at the menace at hand, i.e the rise of fascism, the scope of their rebellion is further reaching. In fact, for the possibility of any positive political change, they propose that it is necessary to instigate a wholesale ontological dismantling. Reality as we know it, with its subject-object distinctions, has to be radically revised. They imagined prehistory as an animistic time when practices such as collective hallucination, mimicry, and sacrifice were just burgeoning and thus had their full social efficacy. By proposing to revive these practices, not in their false appropriation by totalitarian forces, but in their purest form as they were experienced by the prehistoric man, theorists such as Einstein, Caillois, and Bataille aimed to reinvigorate mankind’s agentive capacities. They suggest that modern individualism renders people servile as opposed to the freedom attained through unadulterated communitas. Art is on the frontline to implement such bold endeavours, as it is a liminal and nearly sacred realm which ‘takes its object out of the world of things’ and ‘violates the object by inundating it with negativity and formlessness’. What was a pressing issue for the historic avant-gardes has not dropped out of significance. In this essay, I have discussed how Messager’s works respond to this urgent call articulated some 30 years before the beginning of her career. She mixes high and low, human and animal, sacred and profane, producing uncanny results that challenge our emotions and perceptions. Her works suggest that muddling subject-object distinctions can only be possible through a radical change of attitude, as she invites us to partake in a serious kind of play.
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